Major Flood Map Changes to Bay Minette Al

Hello, Chris Greene here with the Flood Insurance Guru. Today we're talking about pending map changes that are coming to the Bay Minette, Alabama area in April.

As you know, flood map changes can have a big difference on property values. You go to sell your house and all of a sudden you're in a high risk flood zone, that could really limit the amount of people that you could sell your house to. Well, with these pending map changes, it could have a massive impact on the Bay Minette area and the reason is it can impact properties that are being moved from low risk zones to high risk.

Now there are also a lot of properties that are being moved from high risk to low risk, which will help property value. However, if you have your house selling or you're looking at buying and this happens, what do you do?

Well, when you have a flood map change like this you have several different options. You can always find them on our website, floodinsuranceguru.com, usually on our YouTube channel or even on our Facebook. And today we're going to cover them for you as well.

So let's just say the first example is the map changes. You can contest it with an elevation certificate. If you have the elevation certificate that shows certain levels that are above the base flood elevation, then we can actually send it to FEMA for you, dispute it and get a letter of map amendment done. Usually takes about 30 to 60 days, depending on the federal government. So that's one option. The good thing with that is it would remove it back out, really helping your property value.

The next option is you can go through the National Flood Insurance program, which is a program that we do offer here. You can get the old map rates for up to 12 months. So if you've been moved into a high risk zone and you have to go through the National Flood Insurance program, instead of maybe having a $1500 or $2000 rate, you might have a $400 rate, which is very important. Then they would adjust these rates over time.

The third option is you could go to the private market depending on your loan type, which this could be 40, 50, 60% less. You could get a lot more coverage. Thankfully here we have over 20 different carriers when it comes to the private market.

So these are your options here in the Bay Minette area when it comes to these flood map changes. So if you've got questions about what zone you're in or you want to take a look at that flood insurance, just click the link below and we'll be happy to reach out to you to review your zone, see if we could maybe get your zone changed or figure out what the other options are for you. You can also reach us at 205-451-4294. As I mentioned before, visit our website floodinsuranceguru.com or our YouTube and our Facebook, the Flood Insurance Guru.